It’s pretty obvious I have never been a massive blogger, using my amazing maths skills… (also known as the calculator on Windows 7 that calculates differences between dates) I have worked out its been 1 year, 7 months, 1 week and 3 days since I last posted anything on this blog. 589 days is a pretty long time, I have never really been big on blogging or even status updates on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I do however find it intresting looking back over stuff i have wrote, and done many years ago which is why i keep telling myself I should blog more… which never usually happens. A lot has changed since i last posted in 2010, I have graduated from University which is the achievement i’m most proud of so far in life. I remember back to when i started in September 2007, the first few weeks were a massive shock to me… everything i was taught on the first day just went streight over my head and i remember thinking i had made the biggest mistake of my life going to Uni. At the time i was 21 and had not been in education since i finished college when i was 18, so i dont think…
The ability to stop spam is a problem, as a forum myself and a friend run has grown and become more popular over the years, so has the problem of spam to the point where it gets out of control. However an effective method does exist for vBulletin powered forums, best of all its a free plugin. We had already taken several steps to stop spam, including: When a user signs up there name, email and ip address are checked with the database on http://www.stopforumspam.com, if any of the details are in that database the users registration on the forum is denied. During the registration process the user is also required to enter a reCaptcha and answer a question such as “what would you put in a toaster?” It was believed this would be effective in stopping spam as any bot registering would most likely not be able to answer the question or complete the reCaptcha. Despite those measures every few hours the forum would be hit with a wave a spam which will be continually posted until the user account is banned. Example of this: Even after a user has been banned that user could be seen on the active…
My Wisdom Teeth have slowly been growing for a couple of years now, I really do wish they would hurry up and finish… they appear to grow a bit, then do nothing for 6-8 months then grow a bit more. Usually they don’t bother me much at all when they grow, a slight discomfort but nothing more. However these last few days it feels like a bomb has gone off in the back of my mouth, one minute my mouth will be fine then the next it will feel like someone is trying to drill in to my mouth for hours at a time. Not great at all, Ive not been able to concentrate on much and have found it really hard to stay asleep without waking up every hour. I never really understood how a tooth growing could cause so much pain, but now I really do understand. Anyway rant over! I hear the pain of them growing is nothing compared to having them taken out, so ill be quiet and hope it never comes to that! Talking of removing Wisdom Teeth, thats something you probably should not Google when there giving you pain… I posted this post two…
In celebrating the launch of Steam for Mac today, Valve Software has put out an enticing promotional campaign differing from their usual free weekends for content pack updates to their other games, such as Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. This time, they will offer Portal for free, for everyone to keep forever, as long as they respond by May 24. Both Windows and Mac OS X gamers can once again play the much loved puzzle shooter of 2007’s The Orange Box that has won nearly 70 Game of the Year awards. Portal is a first person puzzle shooter that allows players to control a “portal gun,” more appropriately named the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. The players are “lab rats” guided by a mysterious voice known as GLaDOS who seemingly offers helpful advice to the player, but ultimately exposes much sinister motives as the game progresses. Players create “portals” that are used to transport themselves or any objects from one point to another, as they work through the Aperture Science facilities to solve puzzles. The game’s official trailer gives a nice quick overview of the game’s mechanics: To get the game, simply download a copy of Steam if…
Beating domain squatters can be a problem, as i found out around 2 months ago. i decided I wanted my own domain, to use for email and not the @hotmail.com address I had used for years. I decided mattyonline was a good domain main, as it was my nickname with online at the end of it, so could be used for all things i did online. The problem was the .com of mattyonline.com was taken by someone who was just using it to display a page full of adverts, so I thought oh well and registered the mattyonline.net instead as it was free. Anyway fast forward to today and an email arrives in my junk mail from [email protected] which said: Hi, We thought that you definitely need to know that right now the .com version of your domain is secured by Easy domain Recovery and is available for purchase at our page. What we do is take different measures to help you promote your brand on the Internet. Little things’ effectiveness can compare to securing .com to a domain with any other extension. Everyone knows .com, a lot of users will intuitively seek you at .com extension so don’t give…